Staff

The Charm Offensive: Magritte’s Influence on Contemporary Art Kristine Somerville   “All I know of hope, I place in love.” —René Magritte During the World War II, René Magritte aimed…    read more

Clothes Make the Character: Costume Collaborations of Edith Head and Alfred Hitchcock “I knew I was not a creative design genius. I was never going to be the world’s greatest…    read more

Mexican caricaturist, cartoonist, and illustrator Ernesto García Cabral’s work illustrates the reach and popularity of art deco. While he was a prolific artist, creating several thousand cartoons and caricatures, his…    read more

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” —Oscar Wilde Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life by Lisa Chaney. Penguin Books, 2011, 448 pp., $18…    read more

In the summer of 1924, while completing The Great Gatsby on the French Riviera, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, “For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone…    read more

In 1917, while serving as a second lieutenant in the British Army on the Western Front, twenty-six-year-old James Whale was captured by the Germans at Aisne Farm in France. Led…    read more

A work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. —Kandinsky   After her divorce from theater actor Randolph Nelson, to whom she’d been married…    read more

During the winter of 1888, New York police reporter Jacob Riis’s children had scarlet fever, and from Christmas until Easter they seemed to waste away in their sick beds. On…    read more

“Work is more fun than fun.” ~ Noel Coward F. Scott Fitzgerald became the spokesman of the 1920s, but it could have been Anita Loos if she had been game…    read more

One could argue that photography as an art form reveals the least about its creator. What’s being photographed already exists in the world; the photographer finds it, frames the image…    read more

German artist Martin Kippenberger died on March 7, 1997, of liver cancer, six weeks after diagnosis. He was forty-four. His early death turned him into a legend as his reputation…    read more

Around age six or seven, Dylan Thomas became obsessed with learning what made words “tick, beat, burn.” At the kitchen table in the Thomases’ suburban house in Wales, he tirelessly…    read more

In 1924, modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis assembled all of her “Denishawners” in an empty theater in New York City for announcements about the upcoming season. Seventeen-year-old Louise Brooks,…    read more

In 1934, an entire edition of Muskete, a humorous magazine known for its caricature and pictorial jokes, was confiscated by Austrian censors because the Wlassics, a husband-and-wife team of photographers who…    read more

Dissing Academia: From Casuistry to Common Sense By Kristine Somerville Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. William Butler Yeats In the Basement of…    read more

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During his nine-decade career, Hirschfeld generated more than 12,000 drawings that chronicled the history of entertainment in this country. His images have become the logo of the American theater. No…    read more

Amid the discarded garments, feather boas, parasols and scarves littering the canopy bed, a young Cecil Beaton, just sent down from Cambridge, watched his mother at her dressing table as…    read more

Featuring reviews of: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,  Charles Murray. Crown Forum, 2012. Class Matters. Correspondents of The New York Times. Times Books, 2005. Class:  A Guide…    read more

This Found Text feature looks at the life of silent film icon, Louise Brooks. It is not currently available online.

The full text of this feature is not currently available online.

Includes reviews of: Manic Depression and Creativity. D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb. Prometheus Books, 1998, 230 pp., $24 (paper). Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Mind. Kay…    read more

The text of this feature is not currently available online.

This feature is not currently available online.

Featuring reviews of:

Happiness: A History, by Darrin M. McMahon. Grove Press, 2006.
Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. Vintage Books, 2007.
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt. Basic Books, 2006.
Against Happiness: in Praise of Melancholy, by Eric G. Wilson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Graffiti is hardwired into society. People have a natural impulse to leave their mark on public property, to tell the world they were here and, perhaps, what they think about it. Historically, graffiti serves many purposes. Victors of war have used it as territorial markers and gangs to stake out their turf. Politicians use it to spread their ideology while subversives use it to talk back to authorities without fear of reproach. Advertisers promote their products and criminals their unlawful services with graffiti. Lovers immortalize their devotion. The dislocated and alienated claim a sense of place. And artists gain a public audience. At its most basic level, graffiti is an affirmation of our own being; it is an announcement that “I was here.”

In order to achieve a higher awareness, Malevich believed that people had to abandon logic and that art was the gateway for doing so. He had felt an urgent need to release art from rationality: “I give warning of danger. Reason has imprisoned art in a box of square dimensions.”

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This text is not currently available online.

Examination of the art of photographer Francesca Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981.

James Stern never achieved literary celebrity. His books were few, his letters many and his memoir unfinished, yet what he wrote was the stuff of life-the beauty and tragedy of humanity. His memoir, “the problem book,” was not fashioned into a comprehensive work; what we show you from the Stern collection of the British Library are recollections that capture the adventure of childhood set against the backdrop of a mythical time and rarefied place.

Many of Bellows’s friends described him as a man in a hurry. His artistic career bloomed early: at age twenty-six, five years after attending art school under the mentorship of Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design. At thirty he displayed his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was elevated by the Academy to full Academician the next year and was considered the country’s most accomplished lithographer-a meteoric rise by most artistic standards.

Oh how tired I am. From writing 100 pages of dialogue & continuity in 4 days-rewritten as well-12 hours a day without stopping-all I feel is numbness and a buzzing. And I remember my Rosie, my Owner, and sigh, close eyes, dream a minute, kiss your knees, your thighs, while something in me murmurs mama, sweet one, sweet Rosie-and I feel a phantom of sweetness as if this moment too were a dream like last night.

Before falling for photography, Clarence Laughlin had wanted to be a poet. As a young man he immersed himself in the French symbolists, particularly Baudelaire. Unable to sell his prose poems and wanting to quit his job as a bank teller, he bought an inexpensive camera, built a homemade darkroom and taught himself the fundamentals of photography. His goal was to be the Baudelaire of the camera. He called his early results “visual poems” and meant for the images to be explicated like poetry. For Laughlin, objects possessed an intricate web of psychological associations and a multitude of meanings.

During the height of her career, fashion illustration was dismissed by fine-art elitists as trivial or at best a “Cinderella art.” They claimed that the work did not spring from inspiration but rather from the client’s pocketbook and that it was ephemeral — timely rather than timeless. Yet over the decades the aesthetic beauty of the genre has withstood fine-art scrutiny, and fashion illustration is today recognized for its importance as a historical record of a society and style as well as for its popularity among collectors and connoisseurs.

In 1929 American theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes drafted “Airliner Number 4,” a plan for a nine-deck amphibian airliner with areas for deck games, shops and salons, an orchestra, a gymnasium and a solarium. He calculated that twenty engines would be needed to achieve cruising altitude. In Horizons (1932), a book on American streamlined design and urban planning, he carefully detailed the airliner’s projected fl ying time and fuel usage, along with the cost of building, equipping, furnishing and operating the plane. To fi nancial backers, the design seemed innovative but extravagant, and it was never built. [2008]

Laurence Olivier never wanted to be a matinee idol or a leading man who played only romantic heroes. Yet after back-to-back performances in Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Pride and Prejudice in 1939-1940, he was sought after by producers and directors, celebrity magazines and ardent fans. His early roles were classic literary characters. A New York Times reviewer called his portrayal of Heathcliff a case of “a player physically and emotionally ordained for a role.” He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for both Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. Hollywood was sending a rare message: “We want more.”

Berlin artist George Grosz dressed with an air of art-school irony in a variety of costumes — a cowboy hat and spurs, a powdered face, rouged cheeks and lips and a padded, checkered jacket, or a rakish-looking Fedora and an American gangster-styled suit. But the role the young artist played most often was that of the dandified idler, with spats and walking stick, as he joined fellow artists at Café des Westerns to gossip, debate, play chess and drink coffee and spiked lemonade.

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In 1930, after Romaine Brooks sprained her leg, her doctor prescribed bed rest. The artist shut herself in her room in her Parisian apartment on rue Raymond and used the seclusion to begin her Memoir, No Pleasant Memories.

With the publication of This Side of Paradise in early 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton dropout, failed U.S. amy officer and former middling advertising executive, achieved instant celebrity and became a spokesperson for his generation.

In [Schiele’s portraits] he rendered tortured emotional states against isolated, blank backgrounds. All of his stylized portraits reflected his own inner world. In fact, Egon Schiele’s art was a means to learn about his life, his loves, his sexuality.

Impatient with academic formalism, Serge Diaghilev, a charismatic, furiously energetic former law student, founded the World of Art movement in St. Petersburg in October 1898.

Presenting the letters of David O. Selznick. The full text of this feature is not currently available online.